Author's Note: Thanks so much for all the reviews guys, you keep this story rolling. This chapter is a little dark, so be warned.
I own nothing, not even the toilet paper.
Half the squad thinks she's finally hit the fan. Scratch that, everyone except Elliot is biding their time until she packs up her shit and walks out the door. And when Elliot comes in, cell phone glued to his ear, and a "love you more" on his breath, her fingers form to pick up a non-existent packing box, and she nearly aches to disappear.
"Hey."
"Hey"
"We catch?"
"Not yet"
She should ask him how the baby is. She should ask him if Kathleen still has a tattoo, a boyfriend, a social life. She should laugh when she sees his face twist into its patented protective father expression, and she should have bought him coffee. But Eli was the icing on the cake, and when she held him in that ambulance and Kathy was flat lining she sort of thought that she wasn't real anymore, like one of those movies where people realize they are actually dead, they just didn't know it. Eli had a soft head. The disks weren't all sealed and he was all sticky and bloody and ugly, and she had never wanted anything more in her life then what Kathy had.
She's glad Kathy made it. She likes Kathy in a passive aggressive sort of way; in the way that she wants Kathy to be happy and have everything she wants because that way she has somebody to be jealous of. Because she doesn't know how to win. Because if Kathy is around, she can keep her two am nightmares to herself, and the mind fuck that Sealview gave her can stay where it is, eating her stomach, and he won't want to know about it.
"You okay?"
"I'm fine. How's Kathleen?"
She hates how blue his eyes are, because they are so blue she can see through him, she can see crossed optic nerves and fields of vision and she can see that he isn't buying her half assed push at distraction.
"She's fine, though it might scar a little when they remove it on Friday."
She wonders how much it costs to get a tattoo removed. She thinks she might want to go and get inked and then have it removed. Just to be novel. Just to scratch a giant "Fuck you, Elliot Stabler and you too, Harris." Once she wasn't crazy anymore she would get it removed, but she has never been more assured that she has totally lost in her life.
Munch slams the gate shut on the holding cell and she's falling onto a mattress, cuffed. Her chest is so tight she thinks her lungs are going to burst. Somebody's glock pings against the lockers and his stick is tapping against bars and she thinks she is going to die.
"Liv"
She tries to think about when her name stopped being Olivia. She tries to think about how she got here, in an elevator, on the roof, Elliot's hand on her wrist and his damn voice booming her name into her ear.
He got her to the roof. She can breathe, because it's finally cold and it hurts to breathe and she likes it when it hurts like that. She wonders if he got her to the elevator before she really lost it. She wonders who saw her. She thinks she may not care.
A couple more breaths. A few shaky steps. An angry swipe at her mouth. He's watching her like a caged lion watches a zebra, or maybe not, but she likes to think he would fight with her if that's what she needed.
She looks at her foot, which has been designing shapes in the collected dust, and she wants him to push her, to pop her one that is just hard enough to hurt, and she would really like to tell him to go fuck himself.
"Sorry" is all that comes out.
"Hey, Munch's coffee sucks. I understand."
She thinks that Elliot has grown infuriatingly neutral since Eli, since Sealview, since she started needed him.
"You want to talk about it"
"No"
And she's thinking that maybe she would be better off just swan diving off of the building.